Thursday, November 8, 2018

At the National Catholic Register, Edward
Pentin recently interviewed philosopher Thomas Pink on the subject of the
failure of the Church’s leaders to teach and defend her doctrines. (The interview is in two parts, here
and here.) Pink is interesting and insightful as always,
and in general I agree with the substance of his analysis. However, it seems to me that the way he
expresses his main point is potentially misleading and could needlessly open him
up to unfair criticism.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Bernard
Wuellner’s always-useful Dictionary
of Scholastic Philosophy defines violence as “action contrary to the nature of a thing.” Readers of Aristotle and Aquinas will be
familiar with this usage, which is reflected in their distinction between
natural and violent motion. Some of their
applications of this distinction
presuppose obsolete science. For
example, we now know that physical objects do not have motion toward the center
of the earth, specifically, as their natural end. Hence projectile motion away from the earth
is not, after all, violent. But the
distinction itself is not obsolete. For
example, trapping or killing an animal is obviously violent in the relevant
sense. It is acting contrary to the
natural ends of the animal.

Friday, October 12, 2018

A voluntarist conception of persons takes
the will to be primary and the intellect to be secondary.That is to say, for voluntarism, at the end
of the day what we think reflects what we will.An intellectualist conception of
persons takes the intellect to be primary and the will to be secondary.For intellectualism, at the end of the day,
what we will reflects what we think.The
two views are, naturally, more complicated than that.For example, no voluntarist would deny that
what we think affects what we will,
and no intellectualist would deny that what we will affects what we think.But
the basic idea is that for the voluntarist, the will is ultimately in the
driver’s seat, whereas for the intellectualist, the intellect is ultimately in
the driver’s seat.

Monday, September 24, 2018

While there
are still a few days left to September, I should note that this month marks the
10th anniversary of this blog.It was initially started in part to serve as a kind of online supplement
to The
Last Superstition, which was published around the same time.Of the eleven books I’ve written, co-written,
or edited, seven of them (including TLS)
have appeared during the last ten years.We’ll see if I can keep up the pace during the next ten years.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

There are
five considerations that seem to me to make it very likely that Archbishop Viganò’s testimony is truthful.To be sure, given how numerous and detailed
are the claims he makes, it would not be surprising if he has gotten certain particulars
wrong.And perhaps in his passion he has
inadvertently overstated things here and there.But the main claims are probably true.I certainly do not believe he is lying.The reasons are these:

Friday, August 31, 2018

Prof. John
Finnis is the most eminent living “new natural law” theorist, and a longtime
opponent of capital punishment.Indeed,
like other NNL writers, he regards capital punishment as always and inherently wrong, and believes that the Church could
adopt this novel teaching.You might
think, then, that he would approve of Pope Francis’s recent revision to the
catechism.Not so.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

The pattern
is by now familiar. Serious criticisms
are leveled by serious people against the pope; the pope ignores them; and his
associates and defenders disregard the substance of the criticisms while
flinging ad hominem attacks at the
critics. This happened during the doctrinal
controversies over Amoris Laetitia
and capital punishment, and it is happening again in the wake of Archbishop
Vigano’s astonishing testimony. The
pope refuses to answer the charges against him.
The Usual Sycophants try to smear the archbishop and his defenders as disgruntled
reactionaries. Among Uncle Ted’s boys,
Cardinal Cupich leapt almost immediately for the bottom
of the rhetorical barrel: “Quite frankly, they also don’t like [the pope]
because he’s a Latino.”

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

An
international group of 45 Catholic scholars and clergy has signed an appeal to
the cardinals of the Catholic Church, calling on them to advise Pope Francis to
retract the recent revision made to the Catechism, on the grounds that its
appearance of contradicting scripture and traditional teaching is causing
scandal.The appeal and list of
signatories has
been published today as an open letter at First Things.

As LifeSiteNews is reporting, over 30
further Catholic scholars, clergy, and professionals have also added their
signatures to the appeal.This longer
list can
be viewed there.

Friday, August 3, 2018

Pope Francis
has
changed the Catechism’s teaching
on capital punishment so that it now flatly rules out the practice as “inadmissible”
on doctrinal, and not merely prudential, grounds – apparently contradicting two
millennia of clear and consistent teaching to the contrary.I comment on this development in an
article at First Things.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Negative
theology is a crucial component of classical theism.To a first approximation, the idea is that at least with respect to
some aspects of the divine nature, we can say what God is not rather than what
he is.But again, that is only a first
approximation, and a potentially misleading one at that.In his long and substantive introduction to
the spiritual theology of St. Albert the Great in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, Fr. Simon Tugwell makes some
important observations about the matter.I want to call attention to four of them.

Friday, July 20, 2018

In his essay
“Quantum Mechanics and Ontology” in his anthology Philosophy in an Age of Science, Hilary Putnam notes that “mathematically presented quantum-mechanical theories do not wear their
ontologies on their sleeve… the mathematics does not transparently tell us what
the theory is about. Not always,
anyhow” (p. 161). Yet as Putnam also
observes:

The
reaction to [such] remarks of most physicists would, I fear, be somewhat as
follows: “Why bother imposing an ‘ontology’ on quantum mechanics at all?...
[Q]uantum mechanics has a precise mathematical language of its own. If there are problems with that language,
they are problems for mathematical physicists, not for philosophers. And in any case, we know how to use that
language to make predictions accurate to a great many decimal places. If that language does not come with a
criterion of ‘ontological commitment,’ so much the worse for ‘ontology.’”…

Thursday, July 12, 2018

I called
attention recently to the new anthology Neo-Aristotelian
Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons, and
Nicholas Teh, to which I contributed an essay.(If the price of the print version puts you off, you might consider the
much more affordable electronic version.)Tim Crane reviews
the book in the latest First Things.As I also noted recently, Steven French has
reviewed it at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Friday, July 6, 2018

Recently I spent a day at Fermilab and gave a talk on the topic ”What
is a Law of Nature?” I had a wonderful
time and thank the kind folks at Fermilab for their hospitality. You can now watch the video of the talk at the Fermilab website.Abstract of the lecture here.The handout to which I refer in the course of
the lecture can be found here.

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

An argumentum ad hominem (or “argument to
the man”) is the fallacy committed when, instead of addressing the merits of an
argument someone presents you with, you attack the person himself – his
motives, some purported character defect, or the like.This disreputable tactic has, of course,
always been common in public controversies, but resort to the fallacy seems
these days nearly to have eclipsed rational public discourse.A large segment of the country has made it a
matter of policy never to engage its political opponents at the level of
reason, but only ever to demonize them and shout them down.Even in the Church, recent years have seen
the ad hominem routinely deployed
against even the most respectful and scholarly critics of Pope Francis’s
doctrinally problematic statements concerning divorce and remarriage, capital
punishment, and other matters.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

At the recent Society of Catholic
Scientists conference,
Peter Koellner gave a lucid presentation on the relevance of Gödel’s
incompleteness results to the question of whether thought can be
mechanized.Naturally, he had something
to say about the Lucas-Penrose argument.I believe that video of the conference talks will be posted online soon,
but let me briefly summarize the main themes of Koellner’s talk as I remember
them, so that the remarks I want to make about them will be intelligible.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

The
“interaction problem” is traditionally regarded as the main objection to
Descartes’ brand of dualism.I’ve
discussed it many times here at the blog, and of course it is addressed in my
book Philosophy of Mind.The problem concerns
how a res cogitans or “thinking
substance” and a res extensa or
“extended substance” can possibly have any causal influence on one another
given the way Descartes characterizes them.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

We’re due
for another open thread, so here goes.That
threadjacking comment of yours from two weeks ago that got deleted?Repost it here, where it will be welcome and
on topic.‘Cause whether its ontology or
mixology, Ed Wood or the Form of the Good, Saul Bellow or Yello, everything’s on topic.As always, keep it classy and troll-free.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Comics, like
science fiction, can be a great source for philosophical thought
experiments.Recently I’ve been
re-reading one of the classic Marvel storylines from the 1970s, the “Headmen saga” from The Defenders, by Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema.Gerber, who was among the best writers ever
to have worked in comics, famously specialized in absurdist satire, and this
storyline is a prime example.More to
the present point, it contains an interesting twist on a scenario familiar from
discussions of the philosophical problem of personal identity.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Fathers have
the authority to teach and discipline their children, but this authority is not
absolute.They may not teach their
children to do evil, and they may not discipline them with unjust
harshness.Everyone knows this, though
everyone also knows that there are fathers who do in fact abuse their children
or teach them to do evil.Everyone also
knows that it is right for children under these unhappy circumstances to
disobey and reprove their fathers, while still acknowledging their fathers’
authority in general and submitting to his lawful instructions.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

My article “Aquinas
on the Human Soul” appears in the anthology The
Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland and just published by Wiley-Blackwell.
Lots of interesting stuff in this volume. The table of contents and other
information are available here.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.